Saving the World

aka: Save The World

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Brain: Come, we have work to do. Pinky: Oh, right, taking over the world, and all... Brain: No, Pinky — tonight, we must save the world! Pinky: Egad, Brain — save the world?! Brain: YES! So it is available to take over tomorrow night.

While villains love to Take Over the World or cause The End of the World as We Know It, the heroes are most likely motivated by the polar opposite, Saving The World. A fairly simple plot/motivation related to For Great Justice and what not, this trope is pretty broad and very common for many stories not focused on character interaction only. Frequently, this means the main character(s) preventing a preventable apocalypse, such as from the Undead or a natural disaster.

Superman and Supergirl are determined and committed to save the world and protect people for reasons that go beyond simple justice or righteousness: they are the only survivors of a dead world. They cannot bear the thought of losing their adoptive home. Many of their stories lay emphasis on this:

In Krypton No More, Superman is having a breakdown because he fears losing Earth the way he lost Krypton, and he swears he will not let the planet die.

In War World, both cousins fight a planet-buster, star-sized killing satellite to save the whole universe.

Superman: It seems the only thing capable of destroying Warworld... was Warworld itself! The universe has been saved  at least from this menace!

Supergirl: How could anyone make it their mission in life to murder whole worlds? Can you imagine what an abomination that is to an orphan from a dead planet? [...] This world-killing stuff... it hits a nerve. It makes me furious, and the ring just fans the flame!

Digimon Legend has a new group of kids try to save both the Digital World and their home universe.

In crossover fanfiction Once Upon A Shooting Star, several music bands come together to seek out the final few chosen, learn more of the once-shrouded Redemption Organization, and, ultimately, set out to save the world.

Queen of the Damned: Marius (Vincent Perez) and student of the paranormal, Jessica Jesse Reeves (Marguerite Moreau) are trying to stop Akasha from mowing down humans and vampires alike in her ascent to power.

The plot and motivation of nearly every single Power Rangers series ever. Be it from some evil witch or wizard, space pirates, warlords, demons, or mutants, boasting about saving the world means very little to any power ranger, as they've all done it.

The entire plot of Season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise is the titular ship and her crew fighting to save Earth from the Xindi. Things become complicated when the Xindi's motivations are revealed.

Supernatural at the end of season five (Lucifer), six (Eve and Raphael), seven (Leviathans), and eleven (The Darkness).

In Invader Zim, Zim saved the earth from the Planet Jackers. Furthermore, Dib and Zim saved the earth from Tak in the episode Tak the hideous new girl. Dib also saved the earth from the various schemes of Zim.

Deus Ex subverts this — while your inevitable goal is to prevent Big Bad from taking over the world, you can't actually save the world. It's in ruins and your choice is who to hand the reconstruction contract to an AI who wants to assimilate with you, a "compassionate conspiracy" leader that keeps his mentor in cryogenic almost-stasis in his basement, or a well-intentioned ally who thinks that the Big Bad's technology is more trouble than it's worth and wants to destroy it and send the world into anarchy. If any of that counts as "saved" is largely a matter of opinion (or, as the game would put it, choice).

Being an epic sci-fi trilogy, Mass Effect uses the scaled-up version: Shepard and friends are out to save all sentient life in the galaxy.

The original Halo trilogy is primarily about Master Chief, Cortana, and friends trying to prevent the galaxy-killing Halos from firing. The other games have been a mix of world-saving and more small-scale stories.

And in that world, Nier ultimately destroys the last hope for humanity, driving them all to extinction within a generation.

In 'Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, one of the characters, Klungo, creates a horrendous 8-bit arcade platforming game (which he proclaims to be the best ever), titled Hero Klungo Sssavesss Teh World, in which you save the world by holding it over your head''.

Jak and Daxter: Jak does this every game. Not that he ever gets a "thank you" lasting more than 30 seconds into the next game...

Actually, he does get some respect in the third game, mostly from your allies and commoners, but it's easy to miss because literally everyone (yourself included) is preoccupied with the three-way war that's slowly reducing the city to rubble.

Also, the fact that the upper class (reduced to consisting of one guy) still hates you in the third game is a plot point.

Despite appearances of a plotless pretty-looking Puzzle Game, World of Goo's Wham Episode sets you down this path when you have to journey down the Information Superhighway and discover you can thwart the enemy by flooding all their inboxes with spam, and not just any spam, all and any messages deleted in the history of the internet..

Xenosaga did this in different quantities at the end of each game. Since the setting of the game is universal, the first game, which merely threatens the existence of a planet, can't really be a "Saving the World" scenario. The second game is rather unclear in whether or not the characters are saving the world or just fighting some bad guys. The 3rd game is phenomenally epic in scale.

XII has the team of heroes trying to save the kingdom/city-state from becoming the battleground between two rival empires. Not the same scale, but played for just as much drama.

FFVII actually deconstructed this, as it did with many other JRPG tropes. The line gets thrown around a lot, but as we learn more about the characters it becomes clear that there are more personal matters that drive them. Indeed, it almost becomes an excuse; an easy answer that people use because they don't want to admit to their real reasons, or can't explain. In the End, Cloud breaks RPG tradition and admits that the reason he's going after Big Bad Sephiroth isn't due to some higher cause. For him it's a Personal matter, a fight that was started years ago that he intends to finish. Saving the Planet just happens to be a part of that.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant shows why it's important to save the Save the World element for last. Being told that the end boss is going to destroy the world loses a lot of kick when you've already saved the world twice; even once before the halfway point of the game.

In Daggerfall, you initially start off investigating the haunting of the eponymous city by the ghost of a former king as a favor to the Emperor. Naturally, this escalates until you are retrieving the key to an ancient superweapon and must decide which of several parties to give it to. One of the Multiple Endings has you activate yourself, with cataclysmic results.

Skyrim again plays it straight with return of the dragon Alduin, the Beast of the Apocalypse in Nordic tradition, who prophesied to "eat" the current world in order to make room for the next one. Naturally, you must stop him in order to save all of existence.

Most of the Pokémon films. And in the Diamond, Pearl, and Platnium games, replace "the world" with "all existence".

All of the games have this as a major subplot integrated with the main plot of To Be a Master since Gen III, barring the remakes of Gen I and Gen II. It started with May and Brendan in Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, and proceeded to escalate from there, up to the above situation.

One of the (many) notable aspects of Planescape: Torment was that the plot had nothing to do with saving anything, be it city, world, plane etc. Rather, your main quest involved an amnesiac immortal trying to figure out who he is, who took his mortality, and eventually die.

On one occasion you do have to save a town that had literally gone straight to hell. Or, more strictly speaking, it restores itself to its rightful place once you defeat the local villain.

Similarly, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of The Betrayer. While there is a (in the grand scheme, rather small) danger to the world involved if you fail, but the majority of your motivation is that solving the spirit eater curse prevents you from dying, the fact that it no longer terrorizes the world at large is only casually mentioned. This is due to many shared developers.

Averted by the real evil ending which has the player devouring the curse thus becoming the curse itself, getting him/herself expelled from the City of the Dead, then cleansed countless githyanki cities by devouring the souls of all the adults and then delivering their children to their mortal enemies, the brain-sucking, mind-raping mind flayers aka Illithids. If that's not enough, he/she devours the spirits/souls inhabiting the land where he/she once helped (or screwed depending on your playing preference), turning it into a wasteland filled with the walking dead. As if that is still not enough, the player then travels to the planes of existence where the souls of his/her dead former treacherous companions are now resting... and eats them. Whoa. Understandably, the gods get so pissed off, they assembled a humongous army to kill the player and guess what? He/she eats some of the gods too!

Except for the fact that the title refers to the fact that Neku needs to expand his horizons and stop being a gloomy loner

Dragon Age: Origins plays with this trope. While technically you are saving the world by stopping the Blight (i.e. a vast horde of evilmonsters led by a corrupted Dragon-God), the game's codex makes it quite clear that failure on your part will not actually lead to the end of the world. Blights reoccur every few centuries in Thedas, so people who dedicate their lives to stopping them have created a military organization, the Grey Wardens, just for that purpose. If you do not succeed, then one of the other members of your organization, which is thousands strong, would finish it in your place. By stopping the Blight, all you really do is keep the country that you live in from being destroyed before the other Wardens could act. Your victory simply means that the threat ended before the rest of the world noticed the problem.

One of the driving plot points for Parasite Eve and Parasite Eve 2. The other point is trying to figure out why a bunch of animals are mutating and attacking people.

In the RPG parts of Half-Minute Hero, saving the world is so mundane task that while the hero is busy killing the boss to prevent it from catching world destruction spell, he will do other things like put out forest fires in the meantime.

Ultima IV averts this entirely, as there is no threat to the world whatsoever. Ultima VIII kind of subverts it, as you wind up doing a great deal of damage to one world in order to have the opportunity to try to save another. The rest of the main Ultimas play this trope to varying degrees of straight.

In Black Sigil, your ultimate goal is prevent the world from being destroyed by The Forbidden.

The entire plot of the Mass Effect franchise is stopping the Reapers from wiping out every spacefaring species in the galaxy, as they have done every 50,000 years for, according to the "Leviathan" DLC for Mass Effect 3, at least ten billion years.

The plots of three of the first four X-Universe games revolved around stopping two separate Alien Invasions from destroying the Community of Planets. X: Beyond the Frontier saw fish-out-of-water Major Kyle William Brennan join up with the Argon Federation to stop a Xenon planet-killer. X2: The Threat had his son Julian Gardna working to destroy a Kha'ak planet-killer before it could be used a second time. X3: Reunion continued this storyline with Gardna working to stop the Kha'ak warfleet itself.

The ultimate goal in the pacifist run ofUndertale is saving the world, both the underground and the surface world, from Asriel. Even the final battle theme is called SAVE The World!

Webcomics

Off-White: Hugin said Munin's name after the former got blasted by a spell Sköll cast.

The Legend of Korra: A recurring plot for the titular Avatar each arc. Korra had to save her world from non-bending terrorists, an Eldritch Abomination, and a cabal that seeks to eliminate the world's governments.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Twilight Sparkle and her friends do this at least once a season. They actually save the world by redeeming a thousand year old villain in the first two episodes, defeat a god of chaos at the beginning of the second season and stop an evil queen's plot at the end, restore a long-lost empire in the third season by defeating the evil emperor, so on and so on. By season 5, their friends and family have become used to it; at several points, they are surprised to be given the benefit of the doubt in odd situations, and everyone else points out that they've saved the world half a dozen times already.

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